I saw this one coming

About a week ago, as I was getting ready to have my cube shuffled across the building as part of a General Scatteration of our team (another team needed the seats where half of us were, and there’s no contiguous space to put us in at this time), I mentioned to the SLA team leader that I was gonna need help with getting the network cabling right on the switch for the box where I monitored the State A tickets.  So he said something about it to the Tulip, who said, “What???  You’re still workload-managing those accounts and not in the queue taking calls? Just what is this shit??”  Or words to that effect.

Some dust got raised, and when it settled, the Tulip told the managers of the support queue that now serves State A, State C, and Companies B and E that they’d mooched long enough, and they could either make me a job offer good enough to entice me to move across or get me out of that role and let him have his tech back to take calls for the queue since, after all, that’s what I was hired to do.  In the end, it was decided that I was to get off the SLA accounts, effective last Monday morning.  Personally, I had my doubts about whether it could work because I was pretty sure that nobody had the faintest idea just how much of that workload I’d been carrying by myself, and I was very sure that they didn’t have techs trained who could pick it up seamlessly.

Today proved me right.  The Tulip emailed me at mid-morning, saying that one of the other support queue managers had come around to him, and stood there making patterns with his toe in the dirt as he asked, “Ummmm . . . our techs aren’t ready to pick up Company B and Company E yet, and it’ll take several days to get them trained, so . . . just for a little while, you know . . . ummmm . . . could we borrow Sam back for a few days?  Like, um, maybe for a week?”  The Tulip told me the decision of whether to do it was completely up to me, he didn’t care either way.  I replied oh, all right, I’d “condescend” to help ’em this week until they could get a couple of guys more or less ready to go.

So as of mid-afternoon I was back to workload-managing, and it’s a good thing, too, because Company E’s service was in a total uproar.  Besides the dozen normal service calls they had out that no one had pushed to get them completed, they’d had a fire at a branch in California on Sunday and now had 35 systems that were going to need service at best, and replacement more likely, and the Empirical project management office staff were behaving like Chicken Little about it.  I called the company’s corporate help desk, with which I’ve developed a pretty good working relationship, and got them to help me contact the people on site who could give me details about which systems were involved so I can start watching over them.  At the same time I started pushing on the account’s contracted service provider, nagging them to get technicians on site and systems fixed for the ordinary calls instead of lallygagging along as it was obvious they’d been doing yesterday.  By quitting time, it was becoming obvious that Sam Was Back, and things were beginning to move.

And before I could do any of this, I had to spend three-quarters of an hour putting my systems and my cube back together after “being moved.”  I swear, if what happened today is anything to go by, next time I want the movers to fuckin’ leave me alone and let me move my own cube my way!  (Except they won’t and I can’t, ’cos they have a contract with the Empire which prohibits any employee from moving any of his own stuff.)  They left behind one of my two computers, hooked up only a third of what they did move, and did all of that wrong except for the phone, which they let be after putting in the wrong place on the desk so I could’t possibly assemble anything else in a usable way.  I spent from seven until eight running back and forth to retrieve left-behind hardware, crawling under and around the cube to connect all the wires and cables, and pulling apart and reassembling overhead bins and lights to get them placed so they were any use to me.

An Indian hairpin understands the modified clipboard.  Fnord.